


Wood and Nails

by disenchanted



Category: The Young Pope (TV)
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Dubious Consent, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Masturbation, Painplay, Power Imbalance, Roman Catholicism, S&M, Sacrilege, Young Pope: Do Not Eat, how do I even begin to tag this, papal hypocrisy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 11:36:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9547445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: Pope Pius XIII and Cardinal Andrew Dussolier have a minor disagreement about church doctrine.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set during Ep. 6, after Dussolier's encounter with Angelo Sanchez in the restaurant but before his conversation with Sister Mary. This is really not much more than an attempt to work out some of my Young Pope-related sexual frustration.

> ‘Imagine me to-morrow morning teaching the smallest boys about the fall of man! What the devil is one to say? It was such a wholly admirable business and God behaved so badly; mere petty jealousy!’ — George Mallory

 

The windows in the office were closed; the long white curtains that when the windows were open blew in and out with the wind lay still, obscuring the square below, the old stones, the slingshot toys that rose and fell in slow arcs of artificial blue light. Perhaps someone beneath looked up and saw that there was lamplight within. Perhaps someone who loved him, thought Lenny, looked up. _I was within and without_ , he thought.

He lit the cigarette that for several minutes he had kept unlit on his lips. Carefully he considered the image of Venice on the lighter. It put him in mind of the watermarks on the crumbling foundations of the palazzos along the Grand Canal; the sour smell of the water, its scummy greenishness.

‘What power an image has,’ said Lenny, addressing the lighter, ‘when there is memory behind the image. When memory creates the image, and the image creates the memory. But what if there is no memory? What if a person is shown a thing he has never seen, or a thing that no one has ever seen?’

Cardinal Dussolier, standing back from the pontifical desk, seemed to have suffered some fresh loss. He had the whiff of blood about him—no, of wine. His collar and the front of his grey sweater were stained, as if he had spilt on himself. Lenny had no patience for this grimness; he was waiting for the measured hesitancy that Andrew displayed just before he conceded to Lenny’s authority. But it was long in coming: Andrew held to the obstinacy that he was loath to admit he no longer had a right to express.

So Lenny answered himself. ‘That was why,’ he said, ‘Pope Leo III ordered the image of Christ above the gate of the Great Palace of Constantinople destroyed.’

‘Why did you ask me to see you?’ said Andrew.

‘Because I knew you would come,’ said Lenny.

‘Yes,’ said Andrew, ‘but not only that.’

Laboriously Lenny rose from his chair and stepped around his desk, advancing towards Andrew, who stood with his hands behind his back. His hard, frank brow cast his eyes in shadow; somewhere in there was his gaze, shifting between blinks as Lenny drew nearer. His hands fell to his sides, as if he was anticipating reaching out.

‘Because,’ said Lenny, ‘you’re going to kneel in front of me.’ He would not dare say _I want_ to God; he would not deign to say it to Andrew.

Andrew, unmoving, said, ‘Because you want me to say, “You’re right, Lenny,” or because you want me to say, “I’m sorry,” or “I give up,” or “I will”. I won’t; not tonight. I agreed to see you because I wanted to tell you you’re wrong.’

‘Kneel,’ repeated Lenny, ‘in front of me.’

‘An hour ago I was holding a young man who had been told he was unfit to serve God. He was weeping, and I kissed the back of his neck. Earlier today I sat in the corner of the room while he was told he was barred from entering the seminary. He looked at me to intercede and I said nothing.’

‘Do you think I’ve done what I’ve done for you out of a sense of loyalty? God,’ said Lenny, ‘is not loyal. The faithful are loyal to God. They are loyal because they know that if they do not do as He has told them He will turn them out. God has no sense of history; the past is a human invention. _Kneel_.’

There was a quiver at the corner of Andrew’s mouth as he knelt. He must have regretted so much—he, with the conscience as loud as the bells of St. Peter’s, a greater burden to him even than his desire. But he did kneel, because among his burdens there was the loyalty of the truly faithful, who did not ask for revelation.

‘Hold out your hand,’ said Lenny, ‘palm down.’

Andrew’s fingers quivered more than his mouth did: not because he was afraid, though he was, but because his body was fallible, because he smoked more than he should have done, and slept less. He gave his flesh up to so much that was unholy. Lenny drew from his cigarette till the end was hot red, then put it out in the center of the back of Andrew’s hand. Andrew’s breath hitched from the pain of it.

‘Fuck,’ said Andrew, ‘fuck, Lenny.’

‘Your Holiness,’ corrected Lenny. After seeing Andrew’s face, he said, ‘That was a joke,’ and turned to drop the extinguished cigarette into the ashtray on the desk. Upon turning back he saw that Andrew was still on his knees, though pressing the palm of his left hand to the wound on the back of his right.

‘No, no,’ Lenny went on, ‘keep your hand out. Palm up this time.’

Andrew said, ‘This isn’t going to hurt me the way you want me to be hurt.’

‘I don’t care whether or not I hurt you. I don’t care whether or not you’re hurt. If you are I don’t want to know about it; it isn’t important to me to take stock of others’ suffering, not even yours, Andrew, not even if it’s suffering you expect me to share. You would be a terrible martyr, you know: you’re too much of a coward. You would scream as soon as the flames touched the soles of your feet.’

Having made his point, Lenny flicked his lighter so that the flame burned the palm of Andrew’s upturned hand. Andrew grunted, his teeth gritted, his eyes for a moment squeezed shut.

‘And you would be pleased,’ said Andrew. His eyes were open again. ‘You would think it proved that you’re the only one who can feel pain in silence. But you’ve never, not ever, been silent. When your parents left you at the gate of the orphanage you opened your mouth and started to cry, and you haven’t stopped since. I’ve heard it.’

Lenny let his thumb slide down the wheel of the lighter till the flame went dead, then slipped the lighter, the metal of it still sharply hot, into the pocket of his cassock. The flesh at the center of the wound on Andrew’s palm was wet red.

‘I didn’t mean what I said that morning, after you came back from Honduras,’ he said. ‘There are some who have kept their vows of chastity.’

‘You, for instance,’ said Andrew.

‘Yes,’ said Lenny. ‘But not you. That was what I meant.’

‘I know,’ said Andrew. ‘I knew that then.’

His face was turned up, his eyes were no longer in shadow. Lenny could see, now, the forthright look, the crows’ feet writ in the delicate skin, the irises bluer than Lenny’s own. He seemed so mournful. It was just the shape of his face: his brow sloped down at the outer edges. Lenny looked at his mouth and knew that someone had once kissed it, that thin colorless gash with the teeth behind it, and behind the teeth the tongue, the throat.

‘When was the last time you fucked someone?’ asked Lenny.

‘The last morning I spent in Honduras,’ said Andrew.

‘Was it a man?’

‘A man and a woman. Two people, at the same time. More or less.’

‘Did you let the man fuck you,’ asked Lenny, ‘or did you fuck him?’

‘Both,’ said Andrew.

Lenny imagined nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing but what was in the wavering infinite present: the hard ache in his chest that appeared when he smoked too much or too quickly, the slow wilt and fall of Andrew’s hand with its false stigmata. Andrew was remembering what he had done, but Lenny was too holy to conceive of it; he was filled with grace, there was no room for desire. His cassock was so brightly white it burned his body clean. From that nothingness rose a clean, graceful fury.

‘If you’ve shamed yourself it means you live,’ said Lenny, ‘in shame, as if it were your skin, as if it were a stain you could not wash out, as if it were a wound that would not stop bleeding; it means you have forfeited your claim to your body, it means you own nothing, it means that if you were asked to let yourself get fucked in front of the altar of the Sistine Chapel you wouldn’t have the right to refuse.’

Lenny licked a fleck of spit from the corner of his mouth; he ran his tongue over the front of his teeth, hearing the moist fleshy noises it made in the sudden quiet. He said, ‘Unbuckle your belt. Unfasten your pants. Don’t stand up.’

The tremors in Andrew’s hands were, now, the kind that came from fear. The metal fittings on his belt clacked as he fumbled to unbuckle it. Probably he was wondering what would happen to him once he and Lenny were finished here; whether he would be sent somewhere cold; whether he would meet the same fate as the shepherd who claimed to have seen the Madonna among his flock.

Lenny was wondering, too; he hadn’t decided on anything but what he would say next, which was, ‘Do whatever it is you do to make yourself come.’

‘Lenny,’ said Andrew, ‘you don’t want this.’ He was impossibly, grotesquely, divinely gentle; he was the boy looking out of the window, and Lenny was the boy before the gate. But he was wrong: Lenny wanted this thing and was getting what he wanted: what he wanted (this one desire he allowed himself) was to see Andrew burn.

When he realized, finally, that Lenny would say nothing to him until he did as he was told, Andrew pushed the waistband of his pants down far enough that he could pull loose his cock. He was half-hard; Lenny was repulsed by the evidence of his arousal, repulsed even more by the quick practiced motions of his left hand.

‘Other hand,’ said Lenny.

‘I—’ began Andrew, then thought better of it. He took himself in his right hand, so that with each pull of his cock the wound on his palm was rubbed raw. Lenny saw the circular burn on the back of his hand warp with the flexing of the tendons beneath.

‘ _I_ ,’ said Lenny. ‘ _I, I, I, me, me, me, I want, I want, I want, give me, give me, give me_ , like a fucking child. Is that how you pray? _Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with me, me, me._ There is nothing you want more than to be adored. Is that why you let that man in Honduras fuck you? Because when he did it he might have said, “I love you”? Allow me to illumine you, Cardinal Dussolier: he was lying. He does not love you; _I_ do not love you; _God_ ’—Lenny was panting, he had spoken without breathing, there was sweat on his temples; and Andrew, pulling at himself, had closed his eyes and was hideously weeping—‘loves no one, no one, no one, he loves none of us, he has no love to give.’  

With his head tilted back and his tears gleaming in the lamplight, mocking the martyr he would not be, Andrew came. Lenny had never really seen the expression of a person coming before. It was not at all, he thought, like the ecstatic Teresa; it was ugly. Andrew had bitten his lip red, he had wept his blue eyes blurry. His come was spattered on the parquetry. But Lenny loved him, as earnestly and resplendently as God did; he loved him without reservation, he loved him more than himself.

‘Clean it up,’ said Lenny. When Andrew reached into his breast pocket and retrieved a handkerchief he said, ‘Not like that’; and when Andrew then moved to pull up his pants, he said, ‘Not yet.’

So Andrew placed his palms on the floor in front of him and bent, trembling, to lick the wood clean. He remained prostrate until Lenny said, ‘I’m going to press the button on the underside of my desk, now.’

The room did not feel any emptier after Andrew had left. Lenny felt, in each inch of space, the presence of his own shame, dark and dense; when he moved, he seemed to move through a substance as solid as flesh, as if he were within another and within himself at once. He sweated, he breathed shallowly. Beneath his cassock and his white trousers and his white linen briefs he was hard enough that his head swam. To keep from touching himself he leant back against his desk, gripping its edges with both hands. So this, he thought, was the body; this was what he had forgotten; these were the flames on the soles of his feet.

Silently he tilted his head back and opened his mouth. On the ceiling above him he saw the image of Andrew’s throat bared, its shadows shifting as he swallowed, the white of his clerical collar stained red-brown with wine. He said, ‘I’m sorry. Oh, I am, and you don’t believe me. I take it all back and then I say it again in different words. Well I take it back again. I’m sorry; I’m sorry; I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he said, lifting himself on his toes, arching his back, craning his neck till his face was parallel with the ceiling, ‘forgive me, forgive me again,’ whereupon his prayer went silent and he came, shaking with the beauty of his own presence. The long white curtains rippled; somewhere below, Andrew stepped out of the Apostolic Palace and into the darkened gardens.

 

* * *

 


End file.
